Blog Archives

That’s right I’m still alive! (As is Mr Green line, dispute my best efforts.) Apologies for the prolonged radio silence, long story short, everyone else has had far more important things going on in their lives lately so I’ve been doing a bit of a one-man development team thing even more then usual over here.

But I’m back on the radio now, and as you’ve probably noticed, I’ve brought some progress back with me. You might also have noticed I replaced the site’s games page with a page all about lunacy with far more up to date information.

I’m doing a bit of reorganizing over here, when that’s done I should start blogging and tweeting more frequently again.

Ivorie’s character portrait, her werewolf form is based on a white wolf

Even more Optimised: As boring as it is to say, Lunacy has undergone yet more optimization! Everybody’s favorite element of games development.

Music: Andrews’ awesome music is in game, now if only I could figure out how to squeeze it into the next Dev Vid without me having to stop speaking for ages.

Searchable Buildings: Buildings can now be searched for supplies, there’s some definite survival game flavour sneaking into this action game.

Close Quarters Weaponry: Melee/Close Combat weapons are in and working! To be specific a particularly nasty looking baseball bat filled with nails.

Lighting Overhaul: Lunacy is now lit by a mix of vertex lighting, baked light maps and my sweat and tears. In layman’s terms, it’s prettier!

+1 to Scenery: Cars, ambulances, new lampposts, porch lights, new hedges and some suspiciously Cretaceous footprints have been added.

+1 to Ergonomics: On screen joysticks are larger, more sensitive and aligned with the camera in a more constructive manner.

Camera Upgrade: The camera is now angled in a more interesting way, and automatically adjusts itself should buildings block your view.

Smoother Zombies: Zombies now animate and turn more smoothly.

Moar Zombies: The zombies in the suburbs have diversified into Classics, Runners, Sprinters and Crunchy Ones and been color coded for your convenience. I imagine I’ll do a post about the differences between these guys sometime soon.

Only the werewolf transformation and survivor tracking mechanics need to be done now. Then all the core bits that make up a game session are complete and focus can move in the direction of menus, journals, leveling up etc.

Going back through our original 29 page design document, I can’t help but notice how incredibly uninspired the enemy types were. For example two such enemies were the bloated zombies and abominations, just generically larger zombie creatures, the result of mutation and/or Frankenstein-esc body modification.

Now that should sound very familiar to just about anyone who’s played any game with undead antagonists. So familiar I doubt their appearance in Lunacy would cause players to bat an eyelash or even briefly consider what those creatures are doing there. After all I’m pretty sure it’s a commonly accepted trope that wherever there are enough zombies in videogames bigger zombies just happen. Even if that’s not the case its pretty much expected practice of any evil antagonistic faction to start taking their undead apart and putting them back together in horrific, if not questionably practical, ways.

So why am I bringing this up? Well Lets face it, by indie standards Lunacy is not a startlingly original game and I don’t think including such a predictable roster of enemies was going to at all help in making it memorable. As such I’ve been trying to take the enemy roster in a new direction.

So what is far more likely to catch peoples eye, make them interested and maybe even get them to think about the situation a bit? A Vampire T-Rex!… or that’s the theory anyway. This all fits back into a thematic flavor I was initially uncertain about. Where in the game fully embraces the ridiculousness of werewolves fighting zombies and strives to push that quirky insanity further as it goes on. Introducing such wonders as a Vampire T-Rex and Zomb-bees whilst still trying to maintain some measure of logic and not entirely unhinge into sheer randomness. Ideally having the characters question the sanity of the increasingly surreal nature of their opponents in their journals as they go on.

Admittedly, I might also be somewhat motivated by me thinking a vampire T-Rex is the most awesomely ridiculous thing ever, though that might just be the fault of my growing isolation-fueled insanity. Anyway I hope you’ve enjoyed this little delve into my thoughts, we’ve finally finished with some of the more tedious development tasks so the next progress update should be far more interesting.

Things are starting to come together now, here’s an update on what’s happened since I last posted:

The game has undergone a mass of optimization and bug fixing.

After some bickering with it I’ve managed to convince the iPhone 4 to let us use areas/levels arguably far larger then any mobile game should reasonably employ.

Zombies now scatter supplies (in the form of tinned food), health packs and ammo packs on death.

A rough version of the suburbs (Lunacy’s first area) is now in game and working.

We’ve now got the zombies spawning off camera in little groups in a fairly intelligent manner.

All the code for searching buildings is written out and awaiting implementation.

Andrew (Shelton) has very nearly finished making us some frankly quite awesome background music.

With that out of the way, I’m once again going to have a little ramble about elements of the game itself, this time how I intend to approach its narrative.

Now I’m a storyteller at heart, I DM pen and paper roleplaying games, have written pages upon pages of lore for mod projects and, god willing, will publish my own roleplaying system and world one day. So naturally I’ve always wanted to give Lunacy some form of cohesive narrative other then just “You’re traveling from A to B to C killing zombies and other exotic things as you go.”

However, Lunacy is a mobile game, designed to be played in short fast paced sessions. Filling up this limited playtime with dialogue or narration would force the play sessions to be longer, increasing the chance the player will need to put their phone down and do something else before the end of the session.

Furthermore Lunacy is also primarily an action game and interrupting the pace of gameplay in the middle of a session to force dialogue or narration onto the player could annoy a large part of the games potential audience; who likely isn’t interested in slowly unraveling the sinister truth behind why the dead are walking or their characters thoughts about the situation. Rather they just want to have fun fighting some zombies as a werewolf for a little while.

Because of these factors I’ve resorted to what I think is an un-intrusive method of storytelling, one that essentially renders the thick of the games story optional. In each of the games area’s the player has a large amount of objectives to complete in order to unlock the next area. I intend to have the player’s character reflect on their experiences in short, tweet-sized journal entries every time the player completes an objective. All these remarks will then be available in the character’s journal outside of game sessions (and not be forced upon the player in any way), coming together to tell the story of what each character perceives to be going on in Luna City.

Meanwhile anyone not reading the journals will still have a vague narrative akin to many existing mobile action games simply because of their progress through the objectives and the gameplay itself. On a related note I intend to give every element of the game some kind of grounding in the setting as to not break immersion, thusly even the freemium elements we intend to include will make narrative sense within the setting.

And there you have it, I have plenty more to talk about but I think that was definitely enough of a wall of text by itself. Next post I’ll venture into the questionable sanity and reasoning behind why there’s going to be a Vampire T-Rex in the game… yes, you read that right.

Not much to report in the way of changes to the development build, the only obvious change since GameDevMidlands is that reloading now takes 2 seconds and is visualized via an animated icon above the protagonist’s head.

However outside of the dev build there’s been quite a lot going on. Andrew Shelton has joined the fray and is working on some sweet sounding background music for us. Likewise Richard Haddon of Arctic Furnace is now contributing 3D models to the project. So much prettier screenshots are on the way!

Progress update aside I’m trying to write a little about the intended gameplay in each of these updates from now on, this time I’m going to touch on Lunacy’s RPG/progression elements.

In lunacy your werewolf gets more powerful as you increase their level and get them better weapons. As you can probably guess you get levels via Xp, which you get by killing zombies. However you also get a small amount of Xp for searching buildings. Each building search consists of your werewolf briefly entering and exiting the building, you don’t have to navigate around the inside in any way.

Weapons are a bit different though, to get them you have to trade supplies (the games main currency) with survivors you have previously rescued, who will then go out and find the desired weapons for you. You find supplies by searching buildings as well as getting a tiny amount through; you guessed it, killing zombies. However finding survivors is a little more complicated and involves tracking them down by their scent during gameplay. More powerful weapons can only be attained with more allied survivors, and each area only contains a limited number of survivors in need of rescue, so if you want to play with the big guns you’re going to need to explore more and more deadly areas.

Meanwhile leveling in lunacy is pretty simple; your werewolf has four attributes as described below:

As you can probably guess, after gaining a level you’re given a number a points to distribute between these attributes as you see fit. However each character starts with significantly more points in a single attribute. Colt has more endurance, Lupa more speed, Griogair more strength and Ivorie more precision.

And that’s how the games core progression is intended to work at the moment. As always any feedback and/or comments are welcome.